| Abstract: | Near‐controllability is defined for those systems that are uncontrollable but have a large controllable region. It is a property of nonlinear control systems introduced recently, and it has been demonstrated on two classes of discrete‐time bilinear systems. This paper studies near‐controllability of discrete‐time upper‐triangular bilinear systems, which are uncontrollable and are more general than the two classes mentioned. A necessary and sufficient condition for the systems in dimension two to be nearly controllable is presented, which covers the existing results. For the systems with high dimensions, necessary conditions and sufficient conditions of near‐controllability are provided, which generalize the existing results. In particular, the obtained near‐controllability results are applied to controllability of discrete‐time bilinear systems. An example also is given to demonstrate the effectiveness, which shows that the controllability problems of discrete‐time bilinear systems can be solved by near‐controllability. |
